How to Negotiate Effectively (Know Your BATNA!)!

Success in winning a good job offer for yourself in the final stages of your job-hunting, will often depend on your negotiating skills! Here’s how to how to negotiate effectively.

How to Negotiate Effectively

Steps for getting what you want at the negotiating table.

There is no shortage of expert opinion on how to negotiate, as a quick scan of any bookstore’s shelves will reveal. Some of that advice is valuable, but much of it is simply not practical. Too often, what negotiation gurus are really saying is that you have to be a particular kind of person: thick-skinned and supremely confident, afraid of nothing, and with a big-picture mindset. The best bargainers, they say, focus on the issue itself and aren’t distracted by the back-and-forth or the personalities at play.

All that is well and good. But if you are not fully that kind of person or don’t have the time it takes to become that kind of person — one negotiation expert says it requires about 800 hours of practice — then these pages are for you. The tips that follow will show you what you need to know before the bargaining begins, as well as strategies for getting the best deal at the table.

As with many endeavours, preparation is essential — and often more instrumental to success than the tactics employed tableside. If you don’t know what a potential deal is worth to you or haven’t considered how the other party views it, you simply will have no idea where to begin or how to react to an offer.